Fifty-bloody-nine

Another year passes

I’ve been writing this script almost every birthday for ten years, and either doing nothing with them, the scripts that is, or burying them in a blog post or Facebook, or somewhere like that.

17^th October is my birthday, and like tax return day, the date comes round every year without let-up. And I know I shouldn’t think of a birthday and tax return in the same sentence: I suppose it depends on how you think of the word sentence, but as I mature like a fine Italian cheese, the two seem to complement each other oddly, in terms of the regularity.

I used to look forward to birthdays more, I am sure. When I was in single and early double digits, they had a very different feeling to them. I would count the weeks and days down to the event, even marking them off like advent on the kitchen calendar.

How did I become fifty bloody nine?

By ageing yes, I get that bit, but, and I know it’s a cliché, it seems to be happening in a blur.

I do remember writing forty bloody nine because I knew I was on the cusp of becoming fifty, but I had no idea the next ten years would be somewhat odd, to say the least. Bonkers is probably a better summary of what's unfolded.

It might not be popular with some, but I’ll start with politics.

Donald Trump became president when I’d just turned forty-bloody-nine. When it first happened, I didn’t find it particularly unsettling. Now, looking back on his two terms almost, I think it feels like an unhinged part of history. Sure, it wasn’t exactly a perfectly functioning world, but I feel like we’re living under Nurse Ratched’s watch in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ten years later.

I have friends who won’t even talk to their neighbours now in America; such is the political divide. There’s a war that didn’t need to be a war; prices have gone through the roof; you wouldn’t be able to afford to fix anymore; he’s upset every ally and convinced his loyal following they don’t like us either, and gone to bed cuddling a hammer and sickle.

There’s a world to fix, but he spends his time building ballrooms and renaming buildings and oceans and stuff. It’s all a bit odd, regardless of making things great again.

Brexit happened, more families fell out over it, and we discovered that leaving was far more complicated than all those promise-filled slogans suggested. I’m still blaming my next door neighbours and parents-in-law, as if their votes were the only ones that pushed that piece of madness through, but obviously it’s wrong of me to do that. People believe they’re doing the right thing at the time, don’t they? Still, at least we can now eat our fish and chips out of carcinogenic newspaper sheets, like we could in the 70s, because that’s progress.

Boris Johnson happened. Those three words should be enough.

Covid happened too, of course, and while Boris told us all to stay inside, he cracked open the champagne and celebrated in not-so-private, private, like it was Fresher’s Week at the University of Hoorah Henry.

We were forbidden to hug people, and I learned to loathe the words bubble and variant. If someone was coming the other way on a path, we’d throw ourselves into a bush, and hold our breaths until they’d passed. And then I remember people stockpiling toilet rolls. Of all the things humanity might have decided were necessary for survival, toilet paper became a symbol of panic buying.

And I was a part of it. I went out in search of toilet paper one day and came back with children’s movie-themed birthday paper napkins instead. Madness, that I even congratulated myself for considering it a victory that I’d be wiping my backside on Elsa’s smiling face. Do you want to know a secret? I went back and bought a second lot too.

Artificial intelligence learned to talk to us, and rather worryingly, it turned out to be quite good at it. ChatGPT arrived, and you became an expert in whatever field you desired. I suppose that’s a good thing, although I do like the idea of experts being living breathing things.

The Queen died. I’d only ever known one head of state, and it seemed and seems odd to now have new words to the national anthem. Heatwaves have become the norm.

And this one seems an odd thing to mention, but have you noticed, checkouts have nearly all become self-service in the last ten years? It’s not that I necessarily need to have a deep and meaningful conversation in Tesco at the checkout, but I do at least like to have the option. When I was twenty-bloody-one, I dated, for a short time, a wonderful young woman who worked on the tills at our local Waitrose. I used to wait in the longest line just to be in the queue that filed through her checkout. That was a highlight of my Friday evening shop, and week, and I remember passing her a note when I’d plucked up the courage to ask her out for a date, as she bleeped through a dozen oranges and meals for one roast dinners.

As I slowly packed my shopping that she was bleeping through, she peered at my note, and when I came to pay, simply said, “I’d love to. I get off work at 8 o’clock.”

Of course lots and lots of good things have happened.

One word actually comes to mind: family.

Covid may have decimated my business and bank balance, and politics may have lowered my belief in common decency, but you can’t take away the good things that have undoubtedly happened too.

I should list it all I know, as a form of gratitude, which has itself become a social media algorithmic search term: gratitude.

Fifty-bloody-nine.

Next year, of course, I’ll be sixty.

Sixty.

I remember when that sounded like an age where you should start wearing stretchy-waist jeans.

But do you want to know another secret? I’m already there with that one.